


little red thumb (I could eat the sky like an apple)

by ikilledthepaperclip



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, mostly character analysis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-01
Updated: 2016-07-14
Packaged: 2018-05-10 20:03:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5599081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ikilledthepaperclip/pseuds/ikilledthepaperclip
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rey's life hadn't been without its trials. Or: What Kylo Ren might've seen as he turned the pages of her mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Anne Sexton's poem, "The Fury of Sunsets".

She had been young and scrawny and stupid—the usual kind that made a companion of childhood, but stupidity nonetheless. It hadn’t been her fault she clung to intangible things, that she’d been fed on smiling stories and happy songs. It hadn’t been her fault the world hid its true self until she was left alone in the desert. She thought back to her too-big eyes, to her collarbone, small and thin as windweed twigs. _A child_ , she repeated. _A stupid, stupid child_.

Jakku had cured her quickly. What she knew: there had been a ship and then there hadn’t, and even at five she felt a profound sense of larceny, that the ship had taken from her all she loved and continued taking, until even the memory of green and water dissipated with the thrusters’ pluming tail. She wanted to hate the ship, hate the orange fire of its engine exhaust like the orange sun and the orange sand that burned and stung and bit into her. She’d almost convinced herself she _did_ hate it when the truth emerged, half-buried in her heart—her first scavenge: she wanted to understand it. She itched to discover how the thrusters and compressors and hyperspace drives worked. Perhaps then she could seek them out, if they didn’t return for her—but of course they would. Of course they would; they had promised. _But just in case_ , a little voice hummed in the back of her mind, and so she’d learned anyway, crawling through rusted-out cockpits for shiny bits, finding what their functions had been, what value they still had to Unkar Plutt, the junkboss whose rations kept her alive.

She was quick, but hunger had been quicker. Before she understood that a disynchromatic release valve had only a quarter of the value of a hemispherical overflow she’d shrunk and withered, and for the first time in her life, Rey was faced with the reality that no one cared. So she’d gone to Unkar, hoping for mercy. He had been tasked with helping her “find her feet”, after all—at least, she thinks those were the words her parents used as they placed a bulging satchel in his hands. He was a lumbering, corpulent fleshmound of a creature, and she tried to imagine lines of kindness and clemency drawn into his features as she begged him for food, her dry, cracked lips testing every plea in her meager vocabulary. He’d looked at her through beady eyes, and a laugh seeped from deep in his gut. With all the intuition her five-year-old self possessed, Rey shivered.

He’d taken her to his quarters and passed her off to a slimy, vaguely-humanoid individual whose fingers felt like engine oil, and there had been pain. She thought of the robber ship and its orange rockets again, thought of the sun and the sand on her once-smooth feet; that same sear lived within her now, as the creature held her down. But then she’d arrived at the island in her mind, covered in grasses in the middle of the sea and she knew _green_ again, and if agony hadn’t already wrung out her tears she might’ve cried out in joy. She tried to hold onto the feeling of moss under her feet and seabird calls until the slimy creature had finished, grunting words in a foreign tongue. Afterward, she’d limped back to her hovel with half a day’s rations and stayed up the rest of the night, taking apart and rebuilding an old X-wing transmission.

 

The transmission is the first thing Kylo Ren sees when he digs beneath the superficial layers of her mind. He cocks his head and peels back another layer, and another, too fast for her to rebury, until he’s found the island and the little girl with moss at her feet, and underneath it all he exposes the ripping pain and the laughter and the oily grip—

She ejects him from the memory with all the strength she can muster, and he muses aloud over the island and her loneliness, something in his eyes frighteningly out of place. She keeps firmly in her mind the truth that _she is his prisoner_ ; this dark-haired man is interrogating her and his voice carries its own electromagnetism and there should not be this  _pull_ and his eyes should not be so full of—of—what? All these years later and her vocabulary still feels sparse as she searches for words that fit. She sees curiosity, yes, but there is something else. Taking him out of context, she might almost call it _sympathy_ —but the context is impossible to overlook: he wants only information from her. He must. What fractured, monstrous thing would stick its fingers in her wounds and then _feel_ for her? Surely, that would be the greater brutality.

To her relief, he doesn’t voice any additional insights beyond her habitual sleeplessness, but his gaze lingers somewhere just past her skin, and the crease in his brow takes another shape she can’t name.

 

* * *

 

She still checks in on Jakku from time to time, when she needs to feel its sun beat down on her again, or hear the raucous stories the traders share in the marketplace—the pieces of a life that become comforts in spite of themselves. The Force moves in and through all things, she’s learned, and if she listens hard enough, she can hear it in a breath, a heartbeat. It’s how she knows her old neighbor Teedo is still there, riding his luggabeast to town each morning, cursing the dunes and the heat and the beast carrying him on its armored back. It’s how she knows the ancient washerwoman still lives, scrubbing her wares with sand in the waning sunlight.

It’s how she feels the first of Unkar’s underlings fall, his life force not unlike the ship that absconded with her parents. One second he is there, alive and blinking—and then he isn’t, his essence simply _gone_. Rey reasons there must’ve been a fight; he and one of the other partsmasters were squabbling, or he cheated someone, or was cheated himself. These things were far from uncommon in the desert, and she knows it isn’t very Jedi-like of her, but she can’t quite bring herself to the expected state of transcendental compassion over his loss.

Then she feels the second one as his spirit winks out, just as sudden. And a third. And a fourth. By the time she gets to ten she’s weaving through the Force for a deeper meaning. There’s a methodology at work that speaks to more than chaos: they’re being _targeted_. She imagines the city as a candle-covered shrine. Of all the thousands of lives flickering in her mind, someone was—quite intentionally—snuffing out the few she’d had unpleasant dealings with. And yes, _she_ was the common strand, wasn’t she? She’d known all these creatures and daydreamed various unpleasant ends for them long before now. But who was the one crouching over the shrine? Whose fingers loomed above the burning wicks?

_What did they see?_ She wonders, sifting through threads of Force. Eventually, she gathers it’d been too quick for most of them to understand, their last seconds barely registering fear before oblivion descended. From the final two, however, she gleans more substantial evidence. First is Unkar himself, waving his one remaining arm wildly, rusted knife in hand. He’s terrified; the guards outside his quarters are too quiet and out of the corner of his eye something catches on the firelight, seemingly absorbing it—a dark, draped whisper of fabric. There’s a hum, and then silence.

Rey knows the last victim long before the Force begins to replay his final moments. The squat, oily being, unchanged since last she saw him, is picking the remains of a meal from between his teeth. He pauses, suddenly alert in the strange and preternatural way creatures of prey adopt before they’re taken. He calls out to the darkness and Rey manages to suppress her wince, the sound of his voice forever a spoiled, sour thing. He tries to call again but the dark moves around him, alive and dancing. Despite years of Jedi training, Rey feels a feral smile on her teeth as the creature sucks in his last breath—and there’s that hum again, low and electric as the jagged, burning red cuts him clean in two.


	2. Chapter 2

“Their lives were not yours to take.”

She is facing him, lightsaber drawn, and again his expression pulls her out of context. She’d called them hunches years ago. Now, she knows the Force, knows the truth that hums in it, despite everything: his shadows and scars, his saber and its crude red blade buzzing discordantly as he swings it. They are enemies. This is a battlefield. But the Force is here too, and it whispers to her to _look_ : He is reluctant. He is tired. He is remembering something not his to remember.

“I didn’t know you cared for them.” His voice is deep and slick like cavern water. She tries to read a taunt in the words; it would make their struggle easier for her, would spur her into action. She should be striking at him already, she knows.

“You had _no right_ —”

“I have every right to shape the galaxy as I see fit. This is the power we’ve been given; what good is it if we do not use it?”

“We use it to _protect_ ; you knew this. You knew the Jedi way, once.”

“I knew many things, _once_. I knew the Jedi’s restrictions; I knew how narrow their wisdom was: it is half a truth, half of an old story. What is that, if not a lie by omission?”

She twirls her blade in her hands, its blue a clear, true note. His words were Snoke’s and those were poison. She hears Luke in her mind, warning: _You have the strength to end this, but you must not delay_ —but oh, he is a jumble of rusted, shining pieces before her. And she is back in the sand that swallows everything and she wants to _understand_. She wants to take him apart and put him back together; there are things in his eyes glinting at her and she knows there is so much value in them; there are weeks and years and lifetimes of rations.

She paces. “The Dark Side is just as much a half-truth. It offers power, and hides the price. How is that any better?”

It is a crack in both their veneers, and she hears the Force go quiet. She’s never voiced these thoughts; they seemed half-blasphemous as she lay awake after days of training on the island with Luke. Scraps of words had flitted through her mind in the darkened hut: _sides of a coin, mismatched twins, a face always in profile_ —and the feeling underneath it all, wordless, aching: _incomplete_.

His brow furrows in the way that tells her, as clear as the invisible trembling string that runs between them—that has itched and tingled since she saw him gliding toward her like a wraith in the forest—he is considering her words. But it is the way the string sings that tells her his thoughts: _What, then? Are we a binary system? Are we fated to choose one at the expense of the other?_ And the cold soft bite of the Dark twists through him in answer, flicking through their bond and dancing up her spine: _You have chosen. You have chosen. You chose the moment you left your uncle with corpses in the rain, the moment you seared through your father’s heart_ —

“ _No_!”

She pulls the string taught, into silence, before she realizes the word echoes, fresh and raw, in both their throats. Something warm and crisp and far from ugly begins to unfurl in her, sets her fingers twitching in their hold on the saber hilt. Oh, she is _close_. She can do this. His eyes are shining.

“You have done evil things.” She nods to him, to herself; she must not hide from these facts. “But then you kill evil things. These are not the actions of a man who has chosen.”

He stares at her, almost wide-eyed, and his lips tremble and the string hums his _want_. He wants her to be right, wants the fragile thing blooming in her. He feels it through their connection; it is impossible not to. She _radiates_ it, sends it out into the space between them like it is a sweet, bright treasure they might share.

_A temptress’ venom_ , the Dark hisses.

She wants to call his name, but it dawns on her that she doesn’t know it, not really. She knows what others have called him, at other times, on other worlds. She knows what his parents named him, knows they thought it a gift, knows how heavy it grew with each passing year as he learned what it meant, to whom it had belonged. There is a frisson in her core when the string shows her: a great man, a dead man, strapped to a child’s back. The boy shuffles his legacy, tries, and falls. He curses his weakness.

She knows what Snoke chose to call him, knows how hard he has tried to make the sound his own. She knows in his dreams, which are as dark as hers, his mother is screaming _Ben, my Ben, my Ben_ and the body on his back cracks its neck, turns a white-eyed gaze to her in sorrow.

_Tell me what to call you_ , she begs, shame bleeding into her cheeks. She has not begged in so long, has not felt so inarticulate and small. The Dark seems to rise behind him, in the shadowy visage of Snoke, or perhaps Darth Vader, or a hundred other blackened figures through the millennia. Then she feels the brush of Luke at her back, a hand on her shoulder; senses Obi-Wan Kenobi as well, and Master Yoda, and innumerable others who reach out to her from the Light.

He sees the ghosts behind her surely as she sees his, and there is a mutual recognition that sets the string thrumming. _They are casting parts_. She is the Jedi Rey and he is Kylo Ren, Master of the Knights of Ren, and they have been placed here to kill each other.  She raises her saber.

_A name is not a sound_. The thought is neither her own nor his, but she cannot find its source. The hands at her back press tighter, their Light so bright it stings, but she breathes, straightens, steps forward.

The apparition of his grandfather looms over him as a jet cloud, a gloved hand on each of his grandson’s shoulders. _Kylo Ren_ , the shadow booms. The string wails between them; _he hurts, he hurts, he hurts_.

There is no more Luke, no more Yoda, no more Obi-Wan. She is a slight, thin figure— _windweed twigs_ —and the scavenged piece is blooming; it smells like the island, like the sea and the green moss, like life that has chosen to persist, oceans be damned. The piece she’d been guarding since a night on Jakku, many years ago. A salve, and a single hope. She holds it out to him.

_Meet me here_. There is no word for his name, but he has one. She sends it out along the string, all the slivers that are his: _Deep and hurt and soft and smooth tumult danger strength spark pull_ —

He stumbles more than steps, and Vader’s hands claw at his shoulders, but he trudges forward on the hard, flat ground. She is crying; his pain sings to her, and she calls back again with his name. _Deep and soft and strong_ —

She stops when she feels it moving along the string, the faintest beginnings of a song. It is his low voice, halting and half a rasp, but he is so focused on her she can do nothing but listen.

_Brightness sunlight golden dream downfall power missing piece_ —

They are not touching, but she feels him. His eyes are unmoving on her as he gives the slightest nod and to her ears, everything suddenly sounds like singing.

Then he turns and heads back toward his ship, and she turns and heads back toward hers, and it occurs to her nothing was settled. _Sand, sand, sand_ , she thinks. Never settling, always revealing. Oh, and there was finding today; there was profit. The kind she’d never trade in.

She thinks of her treasure as she maneuvers the ship out of orbit. _Green and blue and grey and life and salty softness and dark spice_ —

Her brow furrows. This last bit is a new thing—and yet, she knows it. Knows it like a rugged cape, like the devouring black cloth and fireglass hair; more than this, she suspects she put it there. And she smiles.

From the other end of the string there is a stirring, a single thrum she almost misses, but the island promise is changed now, in some way more than the whisper of him. She listens, looks, touches— _smells_. A dry sweetness underneath it all, a rare thing, and she wonders if he’s placed it there purposefully, at the center. A kind of home, she thinks, and closes her eyes. Not all names have sounds, no, but this one does, and she is not sparse or meager, and there is no more begging: _windweed blossom_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't know exactly when or how this became what it did...but hope you enjoyed!


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